Coral Herrera
" Marriage is the tomb of passionate love "
Benedetto Croce.
The nineteenth century marriage became fashionable. Until then, marriage was an exclusive practice of the wealthier classes, who have property, need to legalize a financial contract between two families who join through his descendants. Marriage has traditionally been an institution based on genetic exchange and reproductive activity, and in the exchange of goods and property of the family patrimony.
marriages were, therefore, not for kings and queens, counts and countess, marquis and marquis, viscount, etc. They were public events that normally had political consequences for states and relevant to the daily lives of its citizens.
wedding Through these links you configure and unconfigure the realms, they changed the maps of the time, and wrestled the political affairs of the rulers of each country. Now that countries are no longer owned by the monarch, the royal wedding yet still retain its symbolic power, because their television viewing continues to sell a very specific model couples, heterosexual, mongámico idealized, keeping the dreams of women who want to be princesses.
And the funny thing is that since its inception, and to Romanticism, love and marriage had nothing to do. Love has never been a requirement to sign the contract between two families. In fact, many authors defend the idea that love has always been a phenomenon born out of wedlock, ie adulterous character, an example of this is courtly love, which we still remains in our culture amatory.
In marriage, financial matters were on the one hand, and other love affairs. Has been true throughout history until the trend changed, and today the majority of couples are united by love (in Spain, for example, love is mentioned in surveys as the main reason to join someone legally .)
Early attempts to institutionalize the marriage took place in Europe around the twelfth century, in the heart of the Christian religion. According Amando de Miguel (1998), polygamy began to lose acceptance in the eighth century, and monogamy was making its way slowly, especially in most of the Jewish communities (except English).
On the other hand, the practice of concubinage was common in the Mediterranean world, so common that it is rare to find true common-law contracts in the notarial records of the late Middle Ages, according to Leah Otis-Cour (2000). In Italy a generation of jurists of Ferrara defended its legitimacy, but in France, Germany and England the ecclesiastical courts prosecute those cohabiting men, many of these cases ended in marriage.
According Otis-Cour (2000), in Northern Europe most cohabiting relationships appear to have been comparable to marriage, it was even common for lovers to share their properties as spouses. When I had children, however, were able to marry to avoid bastardy or illegitimacy. Over time, concubinage was progressively degraded social and symbolically, the fifteenth century was an era of progressive hardening of the moral norms, both by the ecclesiastical authorities as well as intellectuals and civil authorities.
was around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when instituted marriage as an indissoluble sacrament. There began the struggle of the Christian Church against concubinage, polygamy and incest, the clergy wanted to avoid inbreeding of the powerful, who married each other creating large concentrations of land and wealth.
You tried that classes take the same habits as the upper classes, but as we have seen, people in the Middle Ages did not like to marry, preferring adopting relations freely without mediation of any external factor such as state or church. Because the resistance of the population, the Church had to offer a compelling reason for farmers to agree to regularize their situation with the religious authorities, or at least a motivation to conceal the necessity of the Church's presence in all important moments in people's lives: births, marriages, funerals ...
legitimating theory of the sacrament of marriage is based on introducing the erotic as a sin, thus condemning sex outside the reproductive task. The emphasis was on love, which was erected as an important factor between the spouses. Since they would remain all his life working the land together, it was best that they did in harmony, getting along, respecting each other, looking out for each other.
In the eighteenth century, when the middle class acquired ownership and increased in number, the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie, did not conceal at all the convenience in marriage. Eduard Fuchs, in his "Illustrated History of Sexual Morality" (1911), provides plenty of examples to document "how cynically dispensed throughout the slightest ideological dissimulation, avoiding the use of the word love in the wedding, sometimes even prohibited, as something ridiculous and outdated. (...) In the case of small and medium bourgeoisie can not speak of such cynicism. Here the commercial nature of marriage is fraught with ideological embellishment. The man said a long time courting a girl, talk only of love, gain the respect of the girl whose hand was sought and demonstrated how to win her love was worth it. "
way we see how when you can not by force is better to use more subtle means: to seduce women love and mythologized figure of the happy marriage. The second step was legal and economic subjection of women to men through marriage. This really affected mainly the bourgeoisie, because the farmers were tilling the soil together and they had no property to bequeath to their descendants.
The third stage, the key moment was when the consent was instituted as the basis of marriage: that's when love and marriage were firmly united. The contracting began to choose partners, and the heads of family left to decide the fate of the lives of their children, men and women began to choose their degree of affinity and feelings. Thanks to this freedom was legalized the myth of love, which finally invisible economic dimension of marriage and not make it more sentimental than contractual.
is true that the economic dimension is taken into account only when people marry for love with someone from a much higher social class, then there are people who gives his suspicions. If a lower class man joins a high-class woman often social rumors be "married for money", "marries for prestige", "marriage for money be returned, etc.. As with the boyfriend of the Duchess of Alba, in that in addition to social and economic differences, it takes more than thirty years. Otherwise, the example of the royal wedding of Crown Prince English with a working class woman from Madrid, many may think he is in love, but she is an ambitious woman.
Love has a dimension not only economic but also political: people are attracted and falls for people with power and resources. It is logical in a society where property exists private, and where competition is the norm. Falling in love with a person with resources, according to sociobiologists, is an adaptive advantage that arises from cruelty and injustice of an unequal system that prevails in the pecking order.
The lack of female autonomy (a bourgeois women were not left work and wages of the workers have always been lower than men) has fostered economic dependence of women about their parents or husbands. Marriage has always been, until the massive incorporation of women into the labor market, a way of salvation because to be chosen by a man meant having secured the resources for women and children and daughters. Stay
spinster was a disgrace that undermined a woman's self esteem, because it is identified as failed, rare, social or lesbian victims. In patriarchal society, the "ladies" have more status than unmarried women, and the wedding ring is a treasure that patriarchal men gave to a woman, but they do with anyone or any price.
In Hollywood movies always portrayed men as eternal poachers, people who flee to the gallop of the commitment until his age have no choice but to lay his head next to a good woman. Meanwhile, good women as a condition imposed by the ring to be together: "I give you my virginity, you give me the ring." It is a difficult task (soften his heart to be left wanting to know and appreciate the tenderness that she offered), but in the end happy heroines achieve it with kindness, self-sacrifice, discretion, and above all, loyalty.
are many stories that have made us believe that the most important day in the life of a woman is her wedding. Interestingly, married women are also excited about the wedding outside because although their marriage has not been a panacea for happiness, still believe in the myth that the best demonstration love of a man to marry a woman. So women are more likely to become disenchanted with the marriage because they put more expectations than men who identify less romantic adventure with a commitment to marriage.
And yet, despite the fact that marriage is always as the highest aspiration of life and professional women, I have not been studied in depth the benefits of marriage for men, they get, I believe, many more women. In traditional marriage, married men to get a domestic worker who cares for them, giving them children, feed them, dress them, they bare home awaits.
The problem lies in what each hopes of marriage. Now that women can work and some can be financially independent, have a next man is not enough reason to give up the freedom of being single. Women say they want to marry for love and an intense, deep and romantic, despite the impossibility of maintaining the passion of the home for years. When it decays with the passage of time and togetherness, there is frustration that marriage hangs in the air, an upset when it became clear that harmony and happiness in marriage is a story we told.
Today, it is women who stand divorces, and many people returning to love again and remarry, believing he has finally found eternal love is not exhausted or lapsed. This utopia of marriage as a source of happiness is paradoxical, because everyone knows the numbers of divorces and separations, but it would not desist in our idea of \u200b\u200bfinding the mate, the ideal person, the perfect match to fill us completely and forever.
According to Denis de Rougemont (1976) The peculiar feature of marriage in the twentieth century was that tried to reconcile romantic love with marriage, when concepts are contrary to each other, because the passionate love expires and marriage is designed to last forever. Marriage offers stability, security, daily life, a certainty that the other person is willing to share with us your life and your future. However passionate love is a love based on contingency, the fear of losing a loved person, the desire to possess the inaccessible, the delirium seized, mystical ecstasy, the extraordinary experience we disrupts the daily routine.
is why there is a crisis of bourgeois marriage, backed by the number of divorces that occur, according to De Rougemont. Many lay a passionate hope in love tamed that do not match the reality because of these expectations comes the frustration. A human cost us resign ourselves to the idea that you can not have everything at once: safety and excitement, stability and drama, excitement and routine. So I think there is no crisis, just the opposite, that marriage is a rally today, even gays and lesbians have wanted to join the practice.
Despite the idealization of marriage, it is now more consumer device, a sentimentalized and idealized ritual then reveals his real difficulty, because all human relationships are painful, difficult, beautiful, breakable, indestructible intense and complicated.
If you also are not perfect beings, how we create structures perfect sentimental?. The fact is that we feed ... utopias.
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